Chapter 18 documents resulting from the moscow debate

In far away Moscow, the Comintern was thrown into a panic by Chiang Kai-shek's betrayal. An article in "Pravda" on April 15 entitled "The Urgent Moment of the Chinese Revolution" said: "Of course, the Chinese Communist Party does not want to hasten the arrival of events. The task of the Chinese Communist Party and the left wing of the Kuomintang is to oppose imperialism. Use the bourgeoisie as much as possible in the struggle against the warlords. The party's strategic line is to avoid war with the bourgeoisie until it gathers enough strength and until the working class and peasant organizations are consolidated. Now the struggle is coming. The Chinese bourgeoisie The revolution has already been launched. Under such circumstances, it goes without saying that the Chinese Communist Party will help the Kuomintang to drive out the counter-revolutionary traitors and traitors in the cause of national liberation, and will continue to carry out the work of transforming the Kuomintang into a mass organization of the working class and peasants It can be seen from this quotation that the Moscow Communists are still insisting on their theoretical and tactical correctness; A purely naive estimate of the capacity for behavior.

In mid-May, Moscow held the Eighth Plenary Session of the Executive Committee of the Communist International to discuss the Chinese issue.Trotsky vehemently attacked the "unsuccessful" of Stalin's China policy, saying that Stalin's "totally hypocritical treatise was in fact declared inviolable, but the Chinese revolution cannot be bottled and sealed after all." Trotsky declared: "The alliance between the Communist Party and the genuinely revolutionary Kuomintang must not only be maintained, but must be extended and deepened on the basis of mass Soviets."

Stalin had already felt that Trotsky was a fighter who would never stop doing two things and was good at playing tricks. He immediately retorted: "I will try to exclude personal elements from the debate. Comrade Trotsky and Comrade Zinoviev Personal attacks on individual members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party and the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International are worthless. It appears that Comrade Trotsky wanted to present himself as a hero in the Executive Committee of the Communist International, so that the executive The committee turned the discussion of the dangers of war, the Chinese revolution, etc. into a discussion of Trotsky."

Stalin went on to say, "I don't think that Comrade Trotsky deserves so much attention (shouts from his seat: "Yes!"), and besides, he looks like a hero rather than a hero." Actors, it is impossible to confuse actors with heroes. Comrade Trotsky and Comrade Zinoviev, whose Social-Democratic tendencies were exposed by the Seventh Enlarged Plenum of the Executive Committee, cursed the Bolsheviks , this is not an insult to Bukharin or Stalin, I will not say that. On the contrary, if half-Mensheviks like Comrade Trotsky and Zinoviev praised me instead of scolding me, it would be a shame. I am the greatest insult."

It is conceivable how accurate judgments and countermeasures can be made on China's issues in the confrontation between the two sides who have lost their calm.Debaters often use their own language logic to make themselves extreme in order to confront the opponent. Stalin asked rhetorically: "Is the current Wuhan government an organ of the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasants? No. But when the revolution develops further, it has every opportunity to develop into such an organ." Trotsky looked at the matter quite differently.He sees Wuhan as an "empty shelf" rather than a center for a revolutionary movement.To the question of what the Left KMT now represented, Trotsky replied: "For the time being it does not represent anything, or hardly anything."

Stalin believed that only when the bourgeois-democratic revolution is close to complete victory, when the transition to the revolution of the bourgeoisie revolution is revealed in the course of the bourgeois revolution, at that time, it must be established as the elements of the two regimes, The Soviets of Workers, Peasants and Soldiers' Deputies as organs of the struggle for the new power, as organs of the new power, Soviet power. Trotsky naturally refused to give up his point of view. He refuted Stalin in his second speech: "Assuming responsibility for the policies of the Kuomintang and the Wuhan government, just as he repeatedly wanted to take responsibility for the policies of Chiang Kai-shek's former 'National Government' Same. The opposition has nothing in common with this kind of policy. We don’t want to take any responsibility for the policies of the Wuhan government and the leadership of the KMT.”

His assumption was that most of Chiang Kai-shek's soldiers could be won over only through peasant and soldier soviets.Therefore, the Communists must create such Soviets and kill those generals, bureaucrats and bourgeois liberals who are determined to oppose the Soviets. Stalin rarely lifted his pipe to aid his speech, but here he drew a circle in front of his face: "Talk, utter talk!" During this time, the situation in Wuhan became more and more dangerous. On May 17, Xia Douyin, the commander of the 14th Independent Division stationed in Yichang, took advantage of the second Northern Expedition of Henan by the main force of Wuhan to rebel. He attacked Wuhan and arrived at Zhifang, which was only 40 miles away from Wuchang, but was repelled by Ye Ting's troops.

On May 21, Xu Kexiang, head of the 33rd Regiment of the 35th Army stationed in Changsha, rebelled and arrested more than 3,000 Communist workers and peasants overnight, killing hundreds of them. The Hunan Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China decided to mobilize 100,000 peasant troops near Changsha on the 30th to besiege Xu Kexiang. Borodin had a bad temper, and when he encountered such a thing, he kept patting the table and stomping his feet: "All the mistakes come from the overreach of the workers' and peasants' movement. The leader of the Hunan peasant movement is either a local ruffian or a elder brother's association!"

So Chen Duxiu ordered to cancel the plan to attack Changsha.Mao Zedong was also transferred from Hunan to Wuhan as the chairman of the farmers' association. On May 30, the Liuyang Peasant Army, which had not received an order to retreat, attacked Changsha alone and failed. When Wang Jingwei saw Chen Duxiu, there was something in his words: "Didn't you say that there is an army of 100,000, why can't even Xu Kexiang's regiment win?" Chen Duxiu stared with anger, speechless.